Further musings on love

Because duh: What else?

I was a teenage girl when I asked my father, “Dad, why can’t girls just sleep around the way guys can?” My dad said it was because women can get pregnant.

So some years later Britney Spears’ “Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” was playing overhead at the Walgreens where I waited to pick up the morning after pill the morning after the condom broke.

I didn’t tell my high school boyfriend this, but after losing my virginity to him, I had every intention of sleeping with as many people as possible.

I cheated on every partner because mostly I was curious. They wanted me and I was happy to oblige. I saw sex and love as two separate things.

I panicked when I had an abnormal pap smear until I learned that almost everyone has HPV. I tried to explain this to my mother and she said I shouldn’t be so promiscuous. “Then — really — what else can I be?” After bitching about some of my less thrilling and downright scary dating experiences, my friend’s boyfriend said, “What’s the point then? I’d rather just masturbate.” I told him I didn’t think he could understand.

My mother didn’t love me because she simply didn’t know how to. Her parents were both murdered in Mexico when she was a little kid, and she was passed around among half family members until she was dragged across the border. Some of them abused her, some of them hurt her, and only the older women were kind to her, perhaps seeing their own powerless fates in her.

You see, my mother’s parents were not married to each other in super Catholic Mexico. Her father was married to another woman and her mother was the housekeeper. Their murder was the product of jealousy and my mother the indelible product of infidelity. And so she was left barefoot and loveless in Mexico, shouldering a profound unjust shame. How could she love me? There wasn’t any room for it.

There wasn’t any room to love her stubborn, wild first born daughter, whose heartbeat they couldn’t detect during a final ultrasound, so my father prayed to god to give me back. How could she love me? Her runaway, wanton daughter who slugged her father in the face during a fist fight in the front yard for all the neighbors to see. Her troubled, angry daughter whose name means “consecrated to god.”

I don’t know much about the man who would have been my grandfather. I’ve been told he was a notorious womanizer, sleeping his way through parts of Mexico and her sister California, until one day he was run out of San Francisco after sleeping with someone-important’s wife. When I am most confused by the lives of my estranged immediate family, I imagine I must be like my deceased grandfather, tumbling from bed to bed, devoted only to my selfish pleasure and the broken heart I nurse.

On my father’s side, my grandfather and grandmother locked themselves behind a language barrier and their religion, and though I know them, their stories remained secrets until my grandmother was dying of diabetes.

Her body ravaged by dialysis, insulin injections, and a stubborn refusal to change her diet, my grandmother started losing her mind. Her lips loosed with forgetfulness, she told — for the first time — the story of how she met her husband, my grandfather, and it goes like this: She was a girl living on a farm in Cuba, and my grandfather was a traveling salesman. She begged him to take her away from her poor life, and so he did. He swept her away to the city, where they lived in a hotel room until the weight of that sin was too much, and he had to marry her. I wonder what compelled her to beat my dad when he was a kid. I imagine it’s the same frustrated trauma that made me a violent teenager.

When my youngest sister was the same age my mother was when she lost her parents, my mom started having panic attacks. When I was the age my father was when his parents pressured him to go to law school, he became resentful of me. There was no love in that house. There was no love in that house. There was no love in that house. My siblings and I fought each other for survival, and we each broke down under the weight of so many angry ghosts, some of us out loud, and some of us quietly. There was no love in that house. And I do not speak with any of them.

I find myself suspended somewhere between the legacy of my mother and her parents, and the legacy of my father and his parents. I want to always run away and I want to always be saved, and I am too stubborn to commit to either destiny.

Less and less I play the part of someone’s manic pixie dream girl, and more and more I come to first dates fully loaded and ready to fall in love. They follow the same two month pattern, and either they decide I am too much or I decide I am too much, and it’s over. My heart breaks, I write another anguished Medium entry, and then I am onto the next.

I used to think it was because I don’t know love. I used to take every heartbreak as a sign of failure. I am trying to end a cycle of shame and trauma. And those voices — the voices that say things like, “Oh, it is because you are undeserving” — are false ones and now I know it. I started writing this to confess — once again — that I’m fucked up.

Which I am. Sure. But not because I don’t know love. I know it well, which is how I protect myself from situations that I know will hurt me. I’ve struggled and worked hard to get here. I am sad because I am possibly ending something I was into, but I know I’ll be sad for only a little while. Ultimately, I’m taking care of myself and that comes entirely out of self love.

It was only in the middle of one of my worst panic attacks that I was able to get to the bottom of why these dating cycles hurt so much. My mother didn’t know how to love me, and I felt that rejection profoundly. It wasn’t her fault. She was hurt so much that loving me was an impossible wound. When a romantic pursuit ends, it’s not my lover’s rejection I feel, but the old anguish of my mother being too scared to hold me.

I am obsessed with becoming anyone but my parents, and the obscurity of my origins causes me anxiety because how can I know where to run to if I don’t know what I am running from?

I have said that dating is really about learning about yourself. If I could count lessons in lovers then I have learned more than anyone I know. I can’t be my mother’s father forever, as enamored as I am with the romanticization of his cowardice. I am no longer my father’s mother, but still my heart longs for something that will change my life. I am trying to figure out which path is mine and the map I have is not very good. So I see what I can find between the sheets, and trust me, without your clothes on, the lessons become intense.

I have come to learn what love is. To feel it within me and without me. People — like my mother — confuse multiple romantic partners with something deviant. I don’t think I could have learned about love without them, and having no solid foundation to work from, I needed many. I can’t remember all their names, but I can recall everything I learned from them. Every corner of San Francisco holds a story: a kiss, a glance, a hailed cab back to my apartment.

And maybe there is no one for me. Maybe nothing else fits. Maybe there is only me. I can’t know for sure until I’ve been on a few more dates, arched my back between the sheets of a few more partners, and broken my heart a few more times.